What Nobody Tells You About Mobile Gaming And Application Industry

Recently Apple announced their record quarter. Which means they made more money than any other quarter in past. They (almost) met analyst’s prediction with their earnings.

But still their stock fell drastically…

Why is that?

Here is why:

Analysts are saying that the post PC market that Apple introduced and dominated is now on the verge of saturation.

Which I think is true.

There are so many iOS devices sold in past 5 years that the market is nearly saturated. Plus there is also some really good direct competition with GS3/4/Note, Nexus, amazon, MS and (more to come [boot to gecko and Ubuntu phone?])

So what exactly does that mean for us?

Well, lemme simplify it for you:

The market growth i.e. new people coming to the iOS ecosystem will be significantly low compared to how it went on in the past 5 years.

Apple will make most of their money from the upgrades i.e. people upgrading their hardware from previous gen to next gen.

Apple will still make ton of money, but the market is almost saturated and also fragmented with competition, that we won’t see the growth that we saw in past 5 years with everybody and their brother entering the iOS ecosystem.

About Android:- Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle wrote an interesting article, that Android is cheap (cost wise) and appeals to the crowd with lower purchasing power compared to the iOS. Go and read that article about how the marketing strategy of both Apple and Samsung speaks about their most common buyers and their purchasing power.

So, Android as a primary platform is still not my number 1 priority for shipping my products because of low sales I’ve witnessed compared to iOS, also piracy is a kick in the nuts. Yeah if budget allows, there is nothing wrong to port your apps or games to it. But if I have to choose one platform to build a game for, I would go with iOS.

In short: It is easier to sell your product on iOS platform. Because of high purchasing power of the consumers as well as the trust factor that comes with Apple’s app store, they know that these apps or games are pre-screened by Apple.

But now probably we won’t see the exponential market growth of iOS that we saw in the past 5 years. The growth will be there, but it will be slow compared to the past 5 years in iOS’s timeline.

Why should you care?

Well, number of the AAA quality apps and games per person will increase significantly. Which means that you need to compete harder than before.

Competition is gonna get really stiff and many apps that doesn’t have any unique selling proposition (or duplicate apps) might lost in the noise. There will be the dominance of the top 100 developers who will probably take the biggest chuck and the app store will be dominated by AAA quality apps and games.

You will have to compete harder for user’s attention compared to the past 3 or 4 years. The competition in App discovery sector will be really hard and might leave many mid or low end developers out of business if they do not optimize their marketing and promotional strategy accordingly.

If you are depending upon search traffic or organic app store traffic then you probably need to change your traffic and marketing strategy.

Always have some external sources of traffic that you can control

What’s my advice?

Build really good quality apps and games,

Have your USP in place, focus on building a minimum viable product and shipping it fast instead of perfecting it forever.

Do not depend upon just one source of traffic

You need to have at least one or two ultra-hot unique selling proposition in place and a plan to demonstrate it to your potential users dramatically

All righty, so that’s it folks!

Note: If you’re my App Ingenium member, check out the announcement under month 4 on more in depth explanation on how we’re gonna strategize it all in our business.